December 2015. Bookpresentation of Lviv, city of paradoxes in bookshop De Groene Waterman in Antwerpen, Belgium

November 2015. Galerie Zic Zerp shows three photo's of the Waddensea during Pan Amsterdam. http://www.zerp.nl/Augustus 2015. In Galerie Zic Zerp the serie passengers is on show during a group exhibition called across the universe. http://www.zerp.nlJuni 2015. In museum Belverdere are three photo's on show of the Waddensea as a part of a big summer exhibition where 50 artist are performing.Januari 2015. In galerie Sitdown in Parijs there is a exhibition of passengers, photo's of people in the trams and busses of Lviv. see www.sitdown.fr

September 2014. In the meantime, the photo book Lviv, City of Paradoxes is ready. Lviv is a magnificent old Habsburg city with a dramatic history in Western Ukraine. This book is available in two editions; in Dutch / English and in Ukrainian / English. 256 pages / 35 euro / 150 photos by Dolph Kessler / With essays by Michiel Driebergen, Kees van Ruyven and Ruud Meij and with a special map supplement by Herman Zonderland. A number of book presentations and exhibitions will take place in the next few months.

Augustus 2012. The photo book Around the North Sea was released in september 2012. It is the result of four years of photography.

It recieves a lot of publicity in papers, magazines and on exhibitions

Dolph Kessler (Amsterdam, 1950) has been a documentary photographer since 2005. He studied urbanism at Delft University of Technology and presently lives in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. He worked as a regional planner for the province of Friesland (1976-1982), as a municipal councillor for the town of Leeuwarden (1982-1991) and organized study tours (1995-2003). From 2003-2006 he studied at the Fotoacademie Amsterdam. He is now a professional photographer working mostly in a documentary tradition.

He regularly publishes photos in magazines and newspapers. Besides being a photographer of the ‘condition humaine’ (the modern man in the social and cultural context of today), he is a landscape photographer who is fascinated by the meanings and significances given to landscape and nature.

He publishes photobooks on his own account through his company Mauritsheech Publishers. These are mainly limited edition books e.g.: RDM, de laatste dagen van een Rotterdamse fabriek (RDM, the last days of a Rotterdam factory) (2006); Tristan da Cunha (2007); South Atlantic Ocean (2008); Remedios, a small Cuban town (2009). Besides he did a lot of photobooks in commission, such as the photo book Palingvissers and Palingrokers(Eel fishers and Eel smokers) (2007) and the book Een leven lang kunst (A lifelong love of art) (2011).

During the last 8 years he worked on fivee long term projects

1. At the end of 2009 the book Art Fairs was published by d’Jonge Hond Publishers. The book was a compilation of photographs taken by Kessler at high level international art fairs over a period of three years. He went on to win first prize when a selection of these photos was entered into the Art, Culture and Entertainment section of the annual Dutch photographic competition, de Zilveren Camera 2009. The Silver Camera is an annual award for the best Dutch journalistic photo. In 2013 he published a second book about Art Fairs, with the title Art Fairs Revisted

2. The photobooks Around the North Sea (2012) is about the North sea coast of Europa. Dolph Kessler has photographed the North Sea Coast of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, the Shetlands, Scotland, England and Belgium for nearly five years. He shows that for some time now the North Sea Coast of Europe cannot be considered unspoilt anymore and becomes more and more the playground of its inhabitants. Photo’s of this book were shown on international photofestivals, like Photofestival Naarden and Noorder licht (Northern Light). About this books one of the critics wrote:

“Dolph Kessler’s work contains a remarkable power. He likes to show, without passing any judgment, what kind of interventions man makes into reality. Not so much as an individual but rather as a species: man bending the landscape to his will, trying to relate to nature, trying to control it.” (Hans den Hartog Jager)

3. The photobook Lviv, city of paradoxes is his last project and was also self-published in a high run in 2014, respectively.

4. The photobook thwe wave, crossing the Atlantic (also self published in 2017)

5. The photobook: Friesland, the smallest country on earth (also self published in 2017)

Dolph Kessler is inspired by photographers working in the tradition of the New Topographics such as the americans Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfield and Nicholas Nixon and the Europeans like Rob Hornstra, Mark Power and Simon Roberts to name a few.

I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one to find art fairs and gallery openings rather funny and confusing. I know I should be looking at the paintings on the wall, but I always get distracted and start to observe the art loving crowd even more. That’s why Art fairs – Mise en scenes from the art world by Dutch photographer Dolph Kessler just had to be my book of the month. It’s a collection of photo’s taken at art fairs around the world. More of Kessler’s pictures after the jump.

We are a funny bunch, aren’t we? Putting on our fancy clothes to go from opening to opening. Just to look and be looked at. Dolph Kessler was intrigued too by that rather theatrical setting, so he decided to travel the world, for three years, and take pictures at important art fairs.

He visited Frieze Art London, Art Cologne, Paris Photo, Art Dubai, Art Basel Miami Beach and even Art Brussels. He was aiming for pictures that would have a little bit more than just a documentary aspect to them. He really wanted them to have a theatrical feeling: as if the tableaux were ’staged’, with actors instead of just people accidentally walking by. Kessler likes to draw parallels with religion and churchgoers too. I’m not really following him on that one, but his pictures sure are fun to look at. The book is in Dutch and English and comes with a couple of essays and an interview with Mathew Slotover (Frieze Art London).

My Photobooks / 19 january 2019

Introduction

For me, a photobook is the most creative and agreeable format in which one can present photos. These books allow readers to look at photographs in their own time, in the location of their choice and undisturbed by others. Besides, photobooks have a much longer shelf life when you consider that a photographic exhibition has a finite life span of a few weeks or months. That is why, in recent years, I have been making photobooks in order to create a lasting and ongoing timeline of many of my photographic activities. Normally, my photobooks were printed using the time-honoured offset press which has a print run of a minimum of 500 copies.But I have also benefited greatly from increasingly improved digital presses, which allow books to be printed in limited editions.

An overview of photobooks I have made or to which I have contributed, is presented below.